'Maybe he talked with my sister. Erica is at Padolsk with him, she is his secretary there. He never talked with me.'
'I hardly saw him after I went to the Foreign Ministry. Before that I was at the University of Kiev. I have a room at home, but I was working or at night classes for languages.'
'When we went to Magdeburg, when he went home for his holiday in the summer, then we were close. Two weeks in the year, and then we did not speak of this AAICV that you talk of.'
'I don't know… I don't know about his work… believe me, I don't know.'
Mawby looked at his watch, rapped his fingers on the table. Willi heard the door open. He stood up and saw George standing inside the room. A pitiless, cold face, and there was the nod for him to follow.
Surely now they would believe him? Surely they would realise the truth of his ignorance. He tried to remember Lizzie's face and could not, tried to feel her hands on his skin and could not, tried to lhear her words from the pillow and could not.
In his room after he had fallen onto the bed Willi heard the key turn softly in the lock and the diminishing footsteps of George. The tears welled in his eyes and dribbled on his cheeks. He was their prisoner and their pawn and he buried his head in the blankets.
The exalted company would have deterred a less confident man than Charles Mawby.
He stood at the end of the mahogany table in the third floor room of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that overlooked Horseguards, and from his handwritten reminders told the story of the flight of Willi Guttmann and of the sparse information that the defection had provided.
He was listened to patiently by the Deputy-Under-Secretary who headed the Service, by the Major General who commanded the Directorate of Service Intelligence and who took copious pencilled notes, by the Permanent- Under-Secretary who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee and lit a chain of matches to fire his pipe, by the Director of the Security Service who gazed out of the window.
The Joint Intelligence Committee met every fortnight and it had been the opinion of the Deputy-Under- Secretary that the success in bringing over the Russian boy was a matter for moderate congratulation. As he heard Mawby out, he increasingly regretted his decision to offer Guttmann for the agenda.
'… so from our point of view it's been an interesting but frustrating start, the debrief. The boy is obviously extremely fond of his father, and says it's reciprocated. He may in his answers be trying to protect him in the same way that he sought to spare him from punishment through the planning of the escape. After personally questioning him last night I tend to regard his lack of knowledge as genuine. I think that's it, gentlemen.'
Mawby sat down.
'But we are hoping there will be more to come,' the Deputy-Under-Secretary countered the tepid response to the Service's efforts. 'We're getting into a very sensitive area, close to a sensitive man.'
'Close to, but not up alongside,' murmured the
Per- manent-Under-Secretary.
'From our point of view it's pretty clear-cut.' The Director of the Security Service who had worked his apprenticeship with the Malayan and Kenyan colonial police, offered no concessions to the small room and the limited company. 'There'll be no difficulty giving the boy a new suit, a new identity when the time comes.'
' It's a bit of a strip show, isn't it? Plenty of fans and feathers.' The Major General grinned. 'It promises us the moon, gets us forward in our seats, and then it's lights out and the curtain's across. Do you suppose we'll be seeing any more flesh?'
The Deputy-Under-Secretary fidgeted, unhappy that he had over-priced his property. 'We haven't by any means exhausted the enquiries by which Guttmann may give us something of great value.'
The Permanent-Under-Secretary was shuffling his papers, the preparatory move for the agenda's next business. He said politely,
'Thank you for attending, Mr Mawby, you'll keep us posted I am sure.'
Mawby started to rise from his chair. He hadn't done well, and neither had the Service.
The Director's voice boomed out as if addressing a snatch squad about to launch a dawn raid into a tropical township. 'The old man, he goes to Magdeburg each year?'
Mawby stood by his chair. 'He apparently takes his holiday there.'
'Magdeburg in the German Democratic Republic?'
'Yes.'
'How far is Magdeburg from the border?'
'Between forty and fifty kilometres.'
The Permanent-Under-Secretary tugged his spectacles from his face and wiped them vigorously with his handkerchief. 'I'm not following your drift, Director.'
'Mr Mawby gave us two pieces of significant information. Guttmann senior is not a member of the Party, and is extremely fond of Guttmann junior. As I see it we have a tasty carrot and a non-ideological donkey.
Couldn't our carrot be used to entice our donkey from one field to another? The fields would seem to be adjoining.'
'It's a very juicy thought,' the Major General chuckled. 'You'd have us queuing up to chat to him.'
'You've the sort of chaps on your books who could trek over there and proposition him, haven't you Deputy- Under- Secretary?' The Director beamed.
The Deputy-Under-Secretary held his head hidden in his hands, his voice was muffled through his fingers. 'Would it have to go to the politicians?'
The Permanent Under Secretary seemed pained. 'They're so dreadfully squeamish these days, aren't they? You'll bear that in mind when you judge the issue.'
They were on their way. Quick steps down the corridors and stairs and through the front door and towards the waiting cars. The lunch period had been eaten into and unless they scampered would be lost.
'Dig into the files, would you, Charles, for a suitable fellow. See if you can come up with a name for me by tomorrow evening,' the Deputy-Under-Secretary said over his shoulder.
Carter spoke from the dining room door. 'Willi, there's something they want to clarify in London. What are your father's holiday dates
… in Magdeburg this summer?'
God Almighty, what were they thinking about in their ivory towers?
What bloody scheme were they hatching up above the cloud level? They weren't going to try to bring the old man out, not through the minefields, not through the bloody fences. Remember the maxim of the Service, Henry; it exists for the gathering of information and how it is acquired is irrelevant. And it's what the old Service would have done. He curbed himself, doused the thought. They wouldn't be so bloody mad.
'From the first of June to the fifteenth…'
'Thanks, Willi.' Carter glanced at his watch face, read the date. A month till Otto Guttmann went on holiday. Six weeks till he left, that was more positive. What on earth were they playing at in London?
'Why do you need to know, Mr Carter?'
'Don't ask me, lad. Don't expect me to be told anything.'
They had been in the earth bunker at the edge of the Spellersieck wood for eight hours and the relief lorry to collect Ulf Becker and Heini Schalke was late.
The 0400–1200 duty, the killer time. The duty that started as the first birds broke the night silence and that ended at noon with the head pounding in pain, the legs stiffened, the eyes red rimmed from staring out in concentration over the cleared ground to the border fence.
There was no friendship between these two boys as they squatted in the half dark. Becker from Berlin, Schalke from Leipzig. No basis for mutual understanding or trust. The orders of the company commander insisted that sentries should talk together only on matters that affected their operational readiness. And if one spoke in the earth bunker or the watch tower or the patrol jeep then he must know first that his colleagues would not denounce him, and it was the skill of the officers and the NCOs and their rosters that the conscripts never knew with whom they were safe. The boys watched each other with lonely, hawk suspicion.
Becker was close to the end of his eighteen month service in the Border Guard of the National Volks Armee of the German Democratic Republic, Schalke was new and raw and barely introduced to the barracks back in the farming village of Weferl- ingen.
The cold seeped inside the walls of the bunker, edged through their mudstained denims, caught at their ears
